Paris bomber Bilal Hadfi eluded Belgian intelligence

Belgian security services had been tracking Bilal Hadfi for months before the young man blew himself up at the Stade de France last Friday, sources at the federal prosecutor’s office and the justice and defense ministries told POLITICO.

“For several weeks, investigators put a tap on a house that was presumably the house where he was, but they didn’t find him,” said Sieghild Lacoere, the spokesperson for the justice ministry.

Belgian police had opened a case on Hadfi at the beginning of 2015 after the 20-year-old traveled to Syria.

“Belgium launched an international arrest warrant when he left,” said a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, but authorities “lost track of him until he was identified in Paris.”

According to Lacoere, an informant told Belgian authorities that Hadfi “came back into the Schengen zone” following his trip to Syria, though she said she wasn’t aware of which route he took back to Europe.

Belgian news reports described Hadfi as a French national who studied at university in Brussels and lived for a time in a housing project in the capital. When he left for Syria in February, he told his mother he was travelling to Morocco to visit his father’s grave, according to comments she made to La Libre Belgique.

Belgium’s law enforcement and intelligence capabilities have come under critical scrutiny since it emerged that at least four of the nine men suspected of carrying out the gun and suicide bomb attacks in Paris, which killed 129 people, came from or lived in Brussels, mostly in a run-down neighborhood notorious for radicalism called Molenbeek.

Two brothers from Brussels, Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam, were questioned by Belgian police earlier this year after one of them attempted to travel to Syria, but neither was arrested.

On Thursday, police conducted a series of house raids across Brussels to find people allegedly connected to Hadfi, according to the prosecutor’s office. Another home search was conducted in the Brussels neighborhood of Laeken, and a person was being questioned by police.

A spokesperson for the Belgian defense ministry said the military intelligence service had also been involved in Hadfi’s case.

The raids came as Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel announced new measures to combat terrorism in response to the Paris attacks, including a law to jail radicals returning from Syria and an additional €400 million in the budget for anti-radicalization and counter-terrorism programs.

Lacoere at the justice ministry acknowledged that the Hadfi case showed coordination on terrorism and related issues across the EU was difficult, adding: “We’re trying to push in the key councils to really focus on certain problems, including arms trafficking.”

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Jonathan Morgan

Since the events in Paris, Politico has turned from an EU-focused news source to a Belgium-bashing tabloid. I can’t help wondering why the editors would do that – is it that hard to be read in the Bubble? Even Euractiv is doing a better job these days.